


Sweet As Copper Pennies

by Archer973



Series: Build The Castle On Our Passions [2]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 19:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19382995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archer973/pseuds/Archer973
Summary: Bass may have abandoned Charlie in that school hallway, but he came back. And Charlie decides death at his side is better than death alone.





	Sweet As Copper Pennies

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the second short story in my rewrite-season-two-so-it-has-charloe-scenes, which I have decided to call 'Build The Castle On Our Passions'. This one is set when Charlie, Bass, Miles, and Rachel are looking for Aaron in the school. I hope you guys enjoy!

Charlie followed Bass down the hall of the school, silently scouting her side of the corridor. When they had all split up, it was automatic to fall in beside Bass, her right shoulder to his left, her moving with her hunter's grace and him with the bent-kneed walk of a soldier, gun steady at his shoulder as if it were merely an extension of himself.

They hadn't spoken of the division of labor, just peeled off, leaving Miles with Rachel to continue the hunt for Aaron. Charlie knew it should bother her, bother her that it was so natural to fall in beside Bass, to not even think before pairing off with him like they had been doing this all their lives. But it didn't. Maybe it was because they had spent so long on the road together, just the two of them. They had had to rely on each other, trust the other at their back in times of crisis. It wasn't that Charlie thought Bass would step in front of a bullet for her. She knew he wouldn't. But she did trust him not to be the one who shot her, and trusted him to kill the one who did, which was a strange, but honest, kind of comfort.

They heard the Patriots at the same time. Charlie looked quickly for cover and darted into an open door, pressing her back against the wall. Bass had gone to the other side of the hall, tucked around a corner. Charlie silently cursed. She knew by the sound that there were at least seven Patriots coming towards them. Too many to take out without giving away their position with gunfire. She looked over at Bass, hoping he had a plan.

That's when she saw it.

The exit sign.

Bass had been concentrating on the hall, sparing a few glances at her. But when he saw her eyes move passed him, he turned his head and looked. There it was. A way out. He looked back at Charlie, who was trapped on the other side of the hall with no way to get across to him. Charlie narrowed her eyes. _Don't you even think about it_.

Bass looked at her, giving her a wry smile and half a shrug. _Sorry, kid_.

Pushing off the wall, gun easy by his side, Bass shoved the door open and disappeared down the stairs below without even a glance back. Charlie pressed her head back against the wall, fuming as she listened to the Patriots get closer. _Fucking dick._

*          *          *

The stairwell was quiet and deserted as Bass moved down it rapidly, putting distance between himself and the squad of Patriots on the floor above.

_And_ _Charlie_ , part of him whispered snidely, but Bass ignored it, checking that the coast was clear around the next bend. Those Patriots fuckers would shoot him on sight. Charlie wasn't worth his life. He didn't owe her anything.

_“Why did you do it?”_

_“Do what?”_

_“Ask Rachel to save my life?”_

The memory came unbidden, hazy around the edges from the swirl of drugs that had still been in his blood. Drugs that had been meant to kill him, but had saved him instead. Because Charlie had convinced her mother, who hated him more than anyone else in the world, to save his life.

_“A sign of faith.”_

Oh how she had looked at him as she said it, said the words that he had said to her when she asked him the same question. She could have said she was paying back her debt to him, for rescuing her in Pottsboro. He would have accepted that, understood that. A life for a life. An even exchange. Nothing left between them to owe.

But she had looked at him, with those blue eyes the color of summer lakes, and he had seen it. _Trust_. Not the innocent and naive trust of a fool, but the trust of a soldier. Charlie was young in body, but her eyes...

Bass had spent eight years in the military, eight years fighting in one shit desert after another. He had watched new recruits come in, fresh from boot camp, eyes shining and eager. He had watched that shine die. He had watched them lose friends, lose brothers, lose hope. He had seen four eat their own guns. Ten step into enemy fire. Fifty overdose, a hundred climb into the bottle and never climb out.

Charlie may only have been twenty, but her eyes carried the weight of war. She knew the costs, knew the pain. She knew they were all going to die, violent and bloody. And she had trusted him to stand there at her side when they did. To back her play.

He shouldn't have kissed her. He shouldn't have let the drugs pull truths from his mouth, truths that he hadn't admitted to anyone. But she had shown him kindness, and he couldn't keep the words from spilling out. She deserved to know that she was valued, that someone saw her strength and admired it.

Miles saw it and saw the eternal question, the question he had been asking himself for years, ever since the day Charlie was born. Rachel saw it and saw the question Miles asked, the question she did not want to answer. And so she resented it and he feared it and Charlie was left with no one to admire the young woman who had stepped in front of a gun to save her brother's life.

He really shouldn't have kissed her.

Bass realized that he had stopped moving. He was standing at the bottom of the stairwell, pressed into a corner and facing back the way he had come. Back towards Charlie. Back towards the woman who had saved his life as a sign of faith and who had stood guard over him when he was weak.

“Fuck.” Bass said the curse with feeling, thumping his head back against the wall hard enough that his teeth clicked. This was a terrible idea.

Bass turned and headed back up the stairs.

*          *          *

Charlie fought viciously against the Patriot holding her to the wall, but the arm on the back of her neck had her pinned. She turned her head, trying sink her teeth into him, _anything_ to give her a chance to wiggle free. That's when she heard the sound of a sword slicing through flesh.

Not even bothering to look, Charlie took advantage of her captor's lapsed attention and broke out of his grip, slamming her knife into the side of his throat, cutting the artery there with ruthless, practiced precision. Making sure the Patriot dropped to the ground dead, she turned and had a moment of surprise when she saw that it wasn't Miles that had rescued her, but Bass.

“You came back.” The words weren't a question, but the lilt of surprise in her voice asked it anyways. Charlie thought for a moment that Bass was going to make a crack about having to save her ass again, and she had anger ready on the tip of her tongue to lash back at him with. But he didn't. He just looked at her.

Boots thundered in the hall behind her. More Patriots were coming, an even bigger squad then before. Charlie had no time to process what she had seen in Bass' eyes, nor the way he pushed her ahead of him as he urged her to run. It was about survival now as they thundered down the stairs together, more and more Patriot boots sounding behind them.

They ran through the school, exit after exit closing as the Patriots began to surround them. Charlie dove for cover in the rubble of the giant, open room they had been herded into and Bass jumped in after her, landing almost gracefully as he turned and began to fire on the enemy pouring in towards them. Charlie followed suit, grateful that the long months of fighting had significantly improved her command of firearms. Time stopped meaning anything. All that matter was the khaki color of her enemy and the movement of Bass in the corner of her eye, still alive and firing, though she knew that his magazine had to be running dangerously low, just like hers.

_We're going to die_.

The thought was idle, unimportant. She put another bullet in another flash of khaki and knew that soon, her gun would click to empty. It didn't frighten her. She had known for a while now that she was going to die bloody, first against the Militia, now against the Patriots. It was funny, actually. The man who had led the force that was going to kill her before was going to die beside her now.

She bad about that, a little. If he hadn't come back for her, he would probably have made it out. But she couldn't find it in herself to regret that he came back. If she was going to die, she was okay dying beside Sebastian Monroe.

That's when all the Patriots suddenly burst into flames.

At first the sight didn't register. Charlie had been so focused that all she felt was confused that the khaki had disappeared. Then she began to hear the screams and smell the thick, oily scent of cooking flesh. That made her pause. She looked at Bass, confirming that he was not one of the people on fire, then turned back to watch the Patriots burn.

It took a surprisingly short amount of time. Almost unnaturally short. But soon the room was filled with nothing but charred, smoking bodies. Charlie let out the breath that she hadn't realized she had been holding and turned, sinking down so that her back was against the rubble she had been firing over. She felt Bass do the same, the line of his body pressing against her left side from shoulder to knee. For a few moments they just sat there, not saying a word. Then Charlie twisted and punched Bass full in the face.

“Ow, what the fu – !?”

“ _That_ was for ditching me,” Charlie told him, blue eyes flashing with anger. Then, as he opened his mouth in indignant rage, she wrapped her hands in the fabric of his shirt and dragged him over to her, pulling him into a kiss that was just as bruising and punishing as her fist. Bass jerked in surprise, then softened, leaning into her just as Charlie broke the kiss.

“ _That_ was for coming back,” she murmured, and this time the heat in her eyes wasn't from anger. Bass looked at her for a moment, eyes wide. Charlie leaned towards him again and Bass grabbed her arm, stopping her.

“Charlie...” His voice was both a warning and a question, and Charlie reached up and tangled her hand into his hair, reveling in the soft feel of it against her fingers.

“Blame it on the adrenaline, Bass,” Charlie told him, leaning forwards so that they were almost nose to nose, never looking away from his eyes. “Don't feel guilty. Don't think about what it means. Just blame it on the adrenaline.” Bass looked at her for a moment and Charlie almost shivered at the intensity of it. Then the hand around her arm pulled her forwards and Charlie was suddenly in Bass' lap, lips pressed against his.

When they had kissed before, it had been gentle, almost chaste. Bass had cradled her head and pressed his lips to hers softly. Now he devoured her, one hand gripping her hip almost bruisingly and the other buried in her golden waves. Charlie responded with the same force, the hand in his hair tilting his head back so she could get a better angle and the other pressing into his shoulders and the muscles there that she had been trying very hard not to think about. She licked at his open, hungry mouth, tasting the metallic bite of blood from his split lip where her fist had caught him.

But that only urged her on more. Her relationship with Sebastian Monroe had never been an easy one. He had tried to kill her. She had tried to kill him. He had saved her. She had saved him. He had deserted her. He had come back.

He would leave them again. Charlie had no delusions about that. She could see the tension between him and Miles, the outright hatred between him and her mother. Soon something would break and he would leave, maybe even get them killed in his quest for revenge. But they were all going to die anyways. All that mattered was here, now. And today, he had come back for her. Today, she would kiss him like this moment would never end, that they would stay here forever and spill their fire and blood into each other's mouths, passion born of the death they had faced. Tomorrow... well. Tomorrow need not trouble them yet. They had much better things to do.

**Author's Note:**

> So this one was shorter than the last, but it was hard to try'n squeeze more scenes in between the action. Next up is after Bass, Miles, and Rachel come back from Mexico with Connor, but before New Vegas (which is one I'm still trying to decide how I want to handle). I'd love it if you guys wanted to drop me a line, let me know what you think, if you have any requests as far as scenes from the show you think could be expanded on for our favorite duo, questions, comments, etc. I know I'm super late to this party, but I hope there are some people out there who still enjoy this show and these characters. Cheers!


End file.
